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Examples we can productively study

What We Can Learn From the Persuasion of LDS Missionaries

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Missionaries-elders-mormon
       Source: Mormon-wiki

One researcher studying Mormon missionaries estimates that in the thousands of contacts a single member makes in a given year, he or she will convert only about four to seven people. 

Every year about 30,000 men and women between the ages and 18 and 21 pass through a well-manicured collection of low buildings that adjoin the Provo campus of Brigham Young University.  The Missionary Training Center of The Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) lies at the base of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and runs what is perhaps one of the largest missionary training schools on the globe.  The specific goal of the center is to prepare recruits to proselytize for converts in the United States and overseas.  These intending missionaries spend up to twelve weeks honing their foreign language skills, studying The Book of Mormon and The Bible, and getting ready for the rigors of 10-hour days trying to ingratiate themselves to strangers in distant locales.  It’s all part of the church’s tradition of encouraging young members to give up two years to find new converts.

This massive effort at persuasive outreach is a huge change from the mid-nineteenth century, when small groups of followers of Joseph Smith escaped the east and Midwest in their own Diaspora.  Though they eventually settled in the geographic isolation of Utah hoping to be left alone, the LDS Church is now among the largest five denominations in the United States, and one of the fastest growing religions in the world.

All male Mormons over 18 are asked to serve on a mission, and about half do.  Women who are at least 21 can also join the ranks, but in smaller numbers. After they leave the center individuals are assigned a partner who will be their constant companion for the duration of the mission.   Young men in white button-down white shirts, pressed slacks and conservative haircuts easily stand out from their surroundings.   They may end up in Baltimore, Manila, or Sao Paulo.  But they look like they could have just walked out of the pages of your grandparent’s high school yearbook.

Missionaries call potential converts “investigators,” in recognition of the likely fact that conversion is not necessarily a sudden thing.   They are people who seem at least willing to listen, often at bus stops, or on street corners and front yards.  The logic is that the more they learn, the more willing they may be to explore the church be attending services or meetings.

The Student Manual at the Missionary Training Center sees the task of winning converts in terms of the expected biblical admonitions to go out and serve as witnesses for the faith.   In this frame of reference, missionaries often think of themselves as “sharing” or “teaching” the two primary works in the Mormon canon, with the hope that some of these scriptures will be prophetic or provide moral clarity.  The church also emphasizes the classic persuasion idea that you should somehow physically embody what you advocate, a principle that echoes back to ancient rhetorics that urged persuaders to show in their own demeanor the values that they espouse.  New missionaries are taught to be positive and always courteous, and to approach every person as a potential new friend.  This is not an effort that owes much to the irony or cynicism that flows through much of the rest of American life. Earnestness is the order of the day.  They also talk up the importance of family, and especially try to communicate with the unambiguous certainty of a committed believer.

Many new recruits are initially shy.  Most who openly write about their experiences are positive about the experience.  But a reader of these accounts sometimes gets a sense that many of the church’s volunteers don’t see themselves as natural persuaders.  Some appear to struggle to find the confidence to approach people in settings far different than the prosperous Rocky Mountain enclave that is the center of the LDS church.  What do you say to an impoverished mother of seven in a rundown section of Columbus Ohio?  One resident, Star Calley, feels the awkwardness of the moment, but invites Jonathan Hoy and Taylor Nielsen to sit on her porch and talk.  She worries about raising her kids in the neighborhood.  The missionaries listen, sympathize, and then ask her to pray with them.1 After they leave, she admits she was just trying to be nice, noting that “it must take a lot of courage to do what they do, for all the good it does.”  For their part, they hope they can come by again, perhaps building on a first encounter to offer more reassurance that her family will be better off within the local LDS community.

The Manual also offers a range of more secular advice about how to maximize success.  As a general rule, it urges missionaries to follow what is by now an axiom of political persuasion:  look for people who have recently been buffeted by reversals or unwanted change.  “People who are experiencing significant changes in their lives—such as births, deaths, or moving into new homes—are often ready to learn about the restored gospel and make new friendships.”2  It also reminds recruits to find a way to be brief and effective.  What can be offered to someone waiting for a bus, or a person who is willing to give up just a few minutes?  The promise of eternal salvation is, of course, the primary message.  But there are other inducements that open doors as well, such as helping someone do a simple household repair, or offering to help a family research its own history through the vast genealogical resources of the LDS church.

One researcher studying Mormon missionaries estimates that in the thousands of contacts a single member makes in a given year, he or she will convert only about four to seven people.3 That can amount to a “success” rate of one percent or less.  Jonathan Hoy went through the experience and remembers even fewer, but still found his limited success worth the effort.  In 2007 Hoy recalls the nearly 10,000 people he probably talked to during a 22 month stint in Ohio and Greece.  He especially remembers a young woman in Athens who converted after spending time studying various “restored” scriptures from The Book of Mormon.  “I saw it change her life,” he said.  “That’s what keeps me going.”4 

What is sometimes missed in the seemingly low rates of conversion is the crucial role that this rite of passage has on the missionaries themselves.   In the important process self persuasion sometimes the greatest effect a message has is actually on the persuader.  If these missionaries come back with limited success in turning large numbers toward the church, it is nearly certain that they have become committed activists for their faith, carrying some of that fervor into their relationships with others.

___________________

Adapted from Gary C. Woodward and Robert E. Denton Jr., Persuasion and Influence in American Life, Seventh Edition, (Waveland, 2014).

1 Josh Jarman, “God’s Salesmen,” The Columbus Dispatch, Friday July 6, 2007, p. 3B.

2 Missionary Preparation, Student Manual (Salt Lake: Church of the Latter Day Saints, 2005), 99.

3 Gustav Niebuhr, “Youthful Optimism Powers Mormon Missionary Engine,” New York Times, May 23, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/23/us/youthful-optimism-powers-mormon-missionary-engine.html, August 10, 2010.

 4Jarman.

Wearing Our Successes on Our Sleeves

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uniforms wikipediaAcademia can be a lonely place.  In my 40 years of teaching and writing it’s become clear that most us have an increasingly desperate need to carry our successes with us. As even this web site demonstrates, self-promotion has become a professional way of life. Rhetorically, the drill involving these credibility enhancing attempts is familiar. Even before the opening pleasantries of polite conversation are finished, we lapse into hints of self importance, innocently uttered as if by a less bashful self: “Before I resigned as chief spiritual adviser to the Dali Lama. . .” or “As I recall, the phone call informing me that I was a Guggenheim Fellow came just after hanging up with the Chief Justice.”  Albert Einstein famously proposed to an editor that his seminal work on relativity be published “if there is room.”  But these days vanity seems to have the advantage over modesty.
Perhaps we are born with the knack for discovering tropes of personal credibility to remind others that we are.  .  . well, pretty darned important.  We see it nearly every time our professional newsletters duly pass on our news about grants, promotions, sabbaticals and awards. I suspect that conversation analysts probably have a word for this compulsion to establish our bonafides. But I tend to think of it as a kind of garlic that will ward off disciplinary Draculas not easily impressed.  Even if what we say doesn’t inspire, we can at least be satisfied that we dropped enough early hints about our biography to make an impression.
There are many routes to signaling our breathtaking credentials.  A personal favorite is the self-referential “literature review” in our research, where half of the seminal earlier sources identified at the beginning of a paper are actually from the author.Sometimes this habit makes it difficult to function as a reviewer of journal submissions that are supposed to be anonymous. Look at whose work gets cited the most in the notes, and you’ve usually found the author. Then there are those professionals in many fields who seem to travel with the details of their professional lives all but tattooed on their foreheads.  My wife recently attended a seminar for psychotherapists where—I kid you not—the psychiatrist-presenter offered the gathered group his 80 page resume.  For those reluctant to take the bait in paper form, it appeared out of the blue as a PowerPoint extravaganza. The seminar’s theme was not supposed to be about needful personalities with self-esteem issues.  That unintended lesson was simply an added bonus.
Establishing our personal credibility is not just a human impulse.  Who cannot marvel at the capacity of many animals—males mostly—who compulsively mark out their territory to ward off others who would usurp it?  As a critic studying public rhetoric, it’s hard to take in the inevitable opening ritual of selling one’s value without also conjuring images of a neighbor’s pet happily marking every vertical object in sight.
            All of this points to something missing in academia.  Put simply: we need uniforms.  Maybe not the awful pea-green ones used by the Army. And those variegated combat fatigues seen on the streets of Baghdad don’t seem quite right either. But we do require something on which we can hang the symbols of our success. When you think about it, a well-decorated soldier is a walking monument:  part time-capsule, part autobiography, and the bearer of all kinds of official certifications. We hardly need to ask what they’ve been up to.  By contrast, the old academic imitations borrowed from Oxford and Cambridge simply aren’t up to the task.  They were never rich enough in information to record the career-long battles and victories we want others to honor. We prefer our own unoriginal civilian garb. For my colleagues in Film and Cinema studies, it tends toward black jeans and shirts.For Rhetoric faculty of a certain age like myself, the uniform is often a pretty hopeless combination of mismatched pants and sport coats purchased when gas was $1.25 a gallon.  
Perhaps the basic uniform could be a nice neutral grey, or maybe the color of one’s own discipline, as represented in the hood of an academic gown. The color of my academic field is silver, which might make a group of us look like a crowded parking lot on a sunny day.But no matter. The real payoff would be in the academic equivalent of the braids, metals and bars displayed on the life-long combat veteran. Deans might even be permitted to wear gold- braided epaulets.
Dressed out in this plumage, we could impress students with a few references to our war medals:  the one in the image of a thumbtack for teaching a Friday afternoon mass lecture;  the decoration shaped like a racquetball for being forced to lecture in a reverberant room where everything was heard at least three times. We could wear the purple Sign of the Stretched Dollar, given for conference attendance in Nairobi on a travel allowance that wouldn’t get us from New Jersey to New Rochelle. And there is no reason we could not decorate ourselves with pins made up as miniatures of our book covers. 
Bars with nifty colors could also be given for surviving a few years as a chairperson, or answering impossible administrative requests, such as listing “all” the maintenance problems in a program’s 400,000 square foot building. And there could be at least small tokens given at intervals for finding new ways to answer AWOL undergrads who innocently ask if they “missed anything important.”
I’d reserve special medals for close combat on the battlefields of conferences and publishing. We have all seen colleagues laid low by petty and sometime terribly misinformed comments and reviews. Some reviewers are so toxic that you may suspect that their presence kills artificial plants. I have a friend who was advised in an anonymous critique that his article suffered from overlooking the seminal work already done by a superior expert in his specialty.  He was bewildered to discover that it was none other than himself who was supposedly the more knowledgeable source, giving new meaning to the idea of a “blind” review.  And we all probably deserve some awards for surviving the arrows launched in the direction of our own books, papers and articles. I still carry the shrapnel from the panel respondent at a professional meeting that treated my two co-presenters as agents of enlightenment, and me as an unwitting mouthpiece of disinformation.  I thought the old scholar might actually cane me with his walking stick. Or there was that really rude assault on a book that implied—as nearly all book reviews do—that the reviewer should have just written the manuscript himself.  Surely we should find ways to signal our survival in spite of these wounds.
There probably can’t be battle ribbons for the ecstasies of teaching and writing. These moments should be their own rewards. But I for one am ready to add five or ten pounds of shiny hardware to my drab wardrobe, even if I end up looking like a Soviet war veteran on May Day.